ATOM EGOYAN’S AURORA AND ITS RELATION TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Christopher Arkilanian
The Istanbul Biennale is a venue that showcases works from artists living not only in the West of Turkey, but in the immediate areas surrounding the Balkans and the Middle East. Some of the countries in these regions lack the ability to host large-scale art exhibitions and, due to social and political reasons, their artists have limited appeal on the world stage. The objective of the Istanbul Biennale is to promote artists from these locations, to share the experience of the East with the West.1 Turkey is a country that has experienced a lot of political and social unrest in the last hundred years. While the 2007 Biennale was taking place, Turkey was preparing to send their forces to Iraq to combat Kurdish rebels in the mountains.2 Couple that with the fact their bid to join the European Union was rejected and the political turmoil between secularists and Islamists in recent years, and you get the image of a country with a complicated, difficult history.3 So when Hou Hanru of China, proposed the theme, “Not Only Possible But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War”, for the 2007 Biennale he aimed to select works that would not offend the host country or its allies like the United States, at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, the works presented in this exhibition were a more utopian, idealized call for peace.4 One of the few exceptions was a video piece by Atom Egoyan, an Armenian-Canadian independent filmmaker currently living in Toronto, who submitted a work titled Aurora. The video referencing the life of Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, is narrated by women from different nationalities. In this work, the viewer is situated in a room with seven screens each occupied by a women speaking a verse of Aurora’s memoirs alternatively (figs. 1 & 2). The women look and sound traumatized, each expressing their emotions in diverse aural and visual ways. The sense of disorientation evoked by these women is amplified by the viewer who must change his viewpoint to see each of the seven screens.5 Before the work was presented at the Biennale, Egoyan had suggested that viewers focus on the face of one actor at a time, to get a feeling of their personal way of expression. He later regretted this suggestion. In an interview with David Markus for Saatchi online TV and Online he stated that, “The thing about listening to an artist too carefully is that you tend to get overwhelmed by their particular revelation of a given moment.”6 Unfortunately, finding visual references apart from these still photographs was not possible. In the interview, cited above, Egoyan spoke about Aurora and the difficulties of making a video installation versus a feature film. He emphasized the ephemeral quality of Aurora, the fact that he has not able to transfer the work onto a DVD since it would lose the impact of the original instillation.7 Egoyan’s video installation is about Aurora, a girl who survived the Armenian genocide. When Aurora tried to escape Armenia at the age of fourteen, she had already witnessed horrible events. She saw her whole family – her parents, her sister and her three brothers – die. She was forced to live as a Moslem woman in a Harem but she was determined to keep her Christian faith. In the spring of 1917 she escaped to Erzurum, which was overrun by the Russians.8 There, American missionaries cared for her, and the Armenian National Union and American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief helped her immigrate to the United States. Aurora, having survived the genocide, was intent on helping those who
Picturing Children and Youth: A Canadian Perspective | http://picturingchildren.concordia.ca/2010 were still suffering. She was approached by the screenwriter Harvey Gates when she was 17, who helped her write down her experience in a memoir titled Ravaged Armenia, The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl, Who Lived Through the Great Massacres (1918).9 A passage from the book illustrates how she helped two girls she met on her travels deal with this tough subject: The sisters walked on with their arms about each other. They dared not even look around to where their mother lay upon the ground. When we could hear the woman's moans no longer I walked over to them and asked them to let me stay near them. I knew how they must feel. I wondered if my own mother and my littler brothers and sisters had lived.10
Subsequently, M-G-M studios decided to turn the book into a movie. The purpose of the film was to make people more aware of what was happening to the Armenian people (figs. 3 & 4). The profits from the film were to be donated to humanitarian aid, to help those suffering in Anatolia. Interestingly, Aurora played herself, the main character of the film. She reenacted the scenes of her life with 10,000 Armenian residents of Southern California, including 200 deported children.11 A year later, when the movie premiered, Aurora became so overwhelmed by the attention the movie was generating, that she decided to run away and the production company decided to replace her with seven look a-likes, deciding not to inform the public of the real girl’s presence. The movie ended up being an early blockbuster. In trying to find a copy or scenes from the film, I discovered that, while efforts have been made to discover the location of the nine reels that comprise the film, the efforts have unfortunately not been fruitful. The only segment still in existence is one copy kept in the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute.12 As for Aurora, she died in 1994, at the age of 93.13 Atom Egoyan was interested in the way that Aurora’s life was dramatized in the film and how she became an early movie celebrity. Her story captivated people because of the authenticity of the narrative and her personal emotional involvement. In the video piece, Egoyan’s intention is to replicate these intense feelings by having the female performers narrate their lines with different emotional responses. The visible signs of trauma can be numerous and can change from one person to the next, ranging from anger directed towards the perpetrator or with the self, to a cold and distant state, stemming from emotional exhaustion or sheer panic.14 There can also be physical signs, like unexplained pain or lack of sleep. Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages, which explain the psychological stages of trauma that victims go through while coping with grief, can also be used here, especially the first two stages, denial and anger.15 On the screens, the women reflect the different stages of grief and the symptoms of trauma. One woman is very emotional and shocked; another speaks her words with coldly as if she is talking about a trauma disconnected from herself. Egoyan explains the viewers’ reactions to the seven women’s different re-enactment of Aurora’s story in this interview: Some people may find one performance way over the top, whereas others need that sort of emotional release. But in every instance there is a fine line between what is entertaining and what is formulaic - as opposed to what is 'authentic.16
The fact that Egoyan was allowed to present in Turkey was impressive given the fact that just five years earlier, he had created a film that was banned from the country.17 The work was named Ararat, named after a mountain that has many historical and symbolic meanings for Armenians. It touches on the genocide more directly compared to Aurora, since the film shows scenes from the genocide, and stars
Picturing Children and Youth: A Canadian Perspective | http://picturingchildren.concordia.ca/2010 Armenian actors including Arsinée Khanjian or Charles Aznavour. Watching the film as a teenager when it came out, I was actually confused by the story line, since it is not a linear narration, rather, it encompasses different stories simultaneously and spans various time periods. The reason for this is because Egoyan made the movie from the point of view of a filmmaker named Edward Saroyan, who is making a movie about the genocide, from the perspective of a fictionalized Armenian-American artist, Arshille Gorky.18 So, instead of it just being a movie about the events that happened during the genocide, the film is also about the people posing as actors for Edward Saroyan’s film, and their emotional development through the project. The Turkish government was not prepared to ban Ararat outright, but did cut out parts of the film and only planned on playing it in certain theatres to avoid public rage and to downplay the content of the film. As it turned out, Ararat was not shown in Turkey, because the ultra nationalist group, Grey Wolves, threatened to issue consequences if the film was allowed to play in the country.19 While the work of Atom Egoyan, regarding works related to the genocide, relate to historical figures and facts that do not involve the artist directly, Kutlung Ataman shares with the viewer a more personal story. A Turkish artist, Ataman, has been making films since 1994.20 In his video installations, he usually has one on one-camera interviews with subjects. For example Kuba is a video installation on forty screens portraying the marginalized residents of a shantytown in Istanbul, while Paradise is a film that questions the notion that Orange County, California is paradise.21 Ataman and Egoyan, at the Istanbul Biennale in 2007 and the Toronto arts festival LuminaTO earlier that year, showed their video works in the same exhibition space. In Testimony Ataman interviews his Armenian nanny, Kevser, who was sheltered by his Turkish great-grandfather after her family was killed in 1915 (figs. 5 & 6).22 In the film, Kevser recalls what she can of growing up and being taken in from the family. However, she does not mention what happened to her during the genocide. She is too old to remember and, according to Ataman, in an interview with Ezri Basaran, she was trained to forget. He says, “Her being confused and not talking about the subject is an allegory to Turkish society handling the Armenian problem.” Ataman made the video in order to justly portray what, in fact, happened during the First World War.23 The Turkish position, to this day, is that that the Armenian genocide consisted of massacres that were not organized and therefore could not be called genocide. The fact that Armenians murdered thousands of Turkish people also means that it was not genocide. Discussing these events is taboo in Turkey. You can be incarcerated for “Insulting Turkishness” or worse, get killed by extremist groups, in the same way Turkish journalist Hrat Dink was murdered in 2007 (the same year Egoyan and Ataman video works were shown at the Istanbul Biennale) when he agreed with the Armenian side of the story.24 In the interview, Ataman stated that the Nuremberg trials in Germany brought closure and that similar action needs to be taken in Turkey, “For the health of the Turkish society, we need closure on the Armenian case, no matter what. I have the right as a Turkish citizen to know the uncontested truth.” Accordingly, Ataman does feel optimistic regarding the state of Turkey in recent years, saying that the country has been the most liberal he has ever seen and, even if the Justice and Development Party, the Islamic-rooted party of Turkey, is demanding Sharia law be installed, it will not happen because they are not in power. Also, with the help of the American government, over the last year talks between Turkey and Armenia have increased, as both governments are realizing that dialogue is an important part of moving on.25
Picturing Children and Youth: A Canadian Perspective | http://picturingchildren.concordia.ca/2010 In the case of these two artists, the works made by them regarding the genocide are just a facet of their work and have not been the main focus of their careers. Atom Egoyan has been making films since the 1970’s and these two works are his only projects dealing with the subject.26 As for Kutlung Atamans, this is his only work on the subject. The two works contrast each other since Aurora is a piece meant to make the public aware of Aurora’s life, and Testimony is one illustrating the capacity for people to forget the importance of events with time.
Picturing Children and Youth: A Canadian Perspective | http://picturingchildren.concordia.ca/2010 FIGURES
FIG. 1 The seven women from Aurora. (Image:
FIG. 2 One of the faces from Aurora (detail). (Image:
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FIG. 3 Ravished Armenia. (Image:
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FIG. 4 Auction of Souls. (Image:
FIG. 5 Testimony. Three images from the video installation. (Image:
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fig. 6 Testimony . “Kevser” (detail). (Image:
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ENDNOTES 1 Claire Bishop, 10th International Istanbul Biennial: various venues (Nov. 2007)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Armenian National Institute. Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian. 1998-2010. 19 Nov 2010.
Basaran, Ezri. Backstage With Kutlug Ataman: A Video Artist In Search of Adentity. (14 Sept. 2007) 20 Nov. 2010.
Bishop, Claire. 10th International Istanbul Biennial: various venues. (Nov. 2007) 20 Nov. 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_3_46/ai_n30953989/?tag=content;col1>.
Chapman, Alan. elisabeth kübler-ross - five stages of grief. (2006) 21 Dec. 2010.
Ersoy, Özge. On the 11th International Istanbul Biennial. (25 June 2010) 20 Nov. 2010.
Feffer, John. The Art of Anti-War. (21 Sept. 2007) 20 Nov. 2010.
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Healing Resources.Info. healingresources.info. (2005) 21 Dec. 2010.
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Museum-Institute, Armenian Genocide. “Auction of Souls” or “Memorial of Truth.” 2010) 20 Nov. 2010
Sassounian, Harout. Gray Wolves Spoil Turkey's Publicity Ploy on 'Ararat'. (15 Jan. 2004) 19 Nov 2010.
Stéphane/armenews. La Biennale d’Istanbul ou l’Art pour parler du génocide des Arméniens. (September 2007) 20 Nov. 2010.
Vancouver Art Gallery. Past Exhibitions: Kutlung Ataman; Kuba and Paradise. (2006) 20 Nov. 2010. http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/exhibit_kutlug_ataman.html>.
Wikipedia. Ararat (Film). (10 Nov. 2010) 12 Feb. 2011.
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